Central Africa could be stumbling towards another disastrous war. To understand why, it helps to examine the Tutsis' relations with their neighbours

BEFORE the massacre, anonymous leaflets were circulated, calling for Tutsis to be killed. Then, on the night of August 13th, armed marauders overran the Gatumba camp. With guns and machetes, they shot and chopped 160 defenceless refugees to death. The victims were wrapped in pale shrouds and buried in a rough communal grave. The massacre took place in Burundi. The government of Rwanda reacted by announcing that it might have to invade Congo. Small wonder that outsiders find central Africa's wars confusing.

It is not yet clear who carried out the pogrom. A Burundian rebel group claimed responsibility, but witnesses reported that Rwandan and Congolese gunmen also took part. The only certainty is that the victims were mostly Congolese Tutsis.

AFPFresh graves; fresh reasons to fight

The Great Lakes region of central Africa could be on the brink of another catastrophic war. Fighting in eastern Congo is spilling into Rwanda and Burundi, the governments of which are both threatening to send their armies into Congo to defend themselves. The worst may yet be averted. On August 16th, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, called for the UN peacekeeping force in eastern Congo to be increased from 10,800 to 23,900 troops. Extra blue helmets were rushed to the Congo-Burundi border. But the world's attention is not exactly focused on central Africa. News reports dribble out, but their context is rarely understood.

For the past half-century, the Great Lakes region has seen a steady escalation of horror. In Rwanda and Burundi, Hutus have massacred Tutsis and vice versa in 1959, 1963, 1970, 1972, 1988, 1993 and 1994. In the last and worst of these blood-lettings, the Rwandan genocide, some 500,000-800,000 people were murdered in 100 days. And still the killing continued. The conflict spread into the sprawling rain forests of Congo next door, culminating in a complex war that cost at least 3m lives, and which now threatens to re-ignite.

What fuels this inferno? Many locals offer a simple explanation. “Wherever there are Tutsis, there are problems,” says a Congolese man in the eastern town of Bukavu. “Kill them all,” adds one of his companions, only half-jokingly. It's a repulsive wish, but common. And just as students of Middle Eastern politics cannot afford to ignore the anti-Jewish views of the “Arab street”, so those who would understand central Africa must heed the chatter of the region's market places.

Who are the Tutsis? Some anthropologists argue that the label is meaningless. But everyone in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo understands it. The stereotypical Tutsi looks like Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame: tall and thin, with a long thin nose. The other cliché about Tutsis is that they live by herding cattle, whereas their squat, flat-nosed neighbours (this includes the Hutus) subsist by growing crops. In reality, the differences between the two groups are blurred, and there is plenty of intermarriage.

In the West, the Tutsis are best known as the victims of genocide. In 1994, the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda tried to exterminate every Tutsi within its borders, and nearly succeeded. The slaughter stopped when an army of Tutsi exiles—scattered around the region by previous anti-Tutsi pogroms—overthrew the genocidal regime and took over the country. Mr Kagame, a Rwandan Tutsi raised in Uganda, was its leader.

In Rwanda, the Tutsi Paul Kagame rulesReuters

Since then, Mr Kagame's ostensibly multi-ethnic but actually Tutsi-led government has been ruthlessly determined to prevent another genocide and to hang on to power. Besides crushing revolts within Rwanda, his men have twice invaded Congo to hunt down the Hutu génocidaires who fled there. They killed perhaps 200,000 killers and innocents in Congo, and sparked a terrible civil war.

All these conflicts have been, first and foremost, about power and its perks. But because insecurity makes people turn to their tribe for protection, the faultlines of war quickly become tribal. In this region, that often means the Tutsis versus the rest.

Everywhere they live, the Tutsis are a small minority. In Rwanda, where they are perhaps 15% of a population of 9m, they have been firmly in charge since 1994. The country is peaceful and visibly better run than its neighbours. The government is relatively clean, refreshingly businesslike, and beloved of foreign donors. But the surface calm disguises wild currents below. The government's line is that there are no Hutus or Tutsis, only Rwandans. Its ideologues argue that the Hutu-Tutsi divide was a creation of Rwanda's old colonial masters, the Belgians, and that a Tutsi is simply a Hutu whose ancestors owned cows. Public discussion of ethnic differences is, in effect, banned.

Rwandan Hutus can't help noticing that tall, thin people hold a lot of the top jobs, but they risk trouble if they say so. Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu who served as a symbolic president of Rwanda between 1994 and 2000 (while Mr Kagame, as vice-president, called the shots), was jailed for 15 years in June for allegedly inciting ethnic hatred. His real crime appears to be simply that he fell out with the regime.

In Burundi, Hutu-Tutsi relations have been improving, albeit from a wretched base. The country has roughly the same ethnic mix as Rwanda, but its Tutsi elite has run it for much of its 40-odd years of independence, keeping the majority down with flashes of exceptional brutality. A huge massacre of Hutus in Burundi in 1993 helped to convince the Hutu regime in Rwanda that the only way to ensure its own survival was to kill all Tutsis.

Burundi is still at war, but that war is less bloody than it was. Most Hutu rebels have been brought into a power-sharing government. Burundians openly discuss ethnic issues, and a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission is planned. A few hundred diehard Hutu rebels still lob explosives into the capital, but not many people were being killed until last week. That slaughter took place near the border with Congo; the Burundian government is convinced that it was the work of Hutu militias based in Congo.

The situation in Congo is the most complex. Because it is so vast and thinly populated, refugees from its crowded, violent neighbours have been thronging there for over a century. Some 5% of the 20m people in eastern Congo are now Tutsis.

In all three countries, Tutsis feel besieged. Some Tutsis liken themselves to Israelis: they may be few in number and surrounded by enemies, but they survive because they are clever and well-organised, whereas those who would annihilate them are corrupt and incompetent.

Many non-Tutsis take a less favourable view. The street talk is that Tutsis are cunning, duplicitous and bent on regional hegemony. The genocidal Hutus in Rwanda used to call them “cockroaches”. This originally referred to the speed with which Tutsi rebels struck and scuttled away, but became understood to mean that all Tutsis were vermin. The hate-mongering continues, mostly by word of mouth: a recent rumour is that willowy Rwandan women have laced their breasts with poison to kill Congolese politicians they seduce.

There is nothing inevitable about ethnic strife in central Africa

There is nothing inevitable about ethnic strife in central Africa. The seeds were sown when German and Belgian colonists first politicised the Hutu-Tutsi divide. Arriving in Rwanda and Burundi in the late 19th century, they found sophisticated warrior kingdoms, where the minority Tutsis ruled over the majority Hutus but both groups seemed to rub along well enough. The Europeans decided that the taller, skinnier Tutsis must be a separate race, superior to the Hutus. Bewhiskered anthropologists classified them as the lost descendants of Ham, Noah's errant son.

Most of this is bunk. Yet successive colonial administrations made it appear true, by favouring the Tutsis at the Hutus' expense. They made forced labourers of the Hutus, and whip-wielding overseers of the Tutsis. They even made everyone carry an ethnic identity card.

During the run-up to independence in Rwanda, the Belgians changed their minds and started to favour the Hutus instead. The then-fashionable view was that Hutus were oppressed, and therefore deserving. The Hutus took power, massacred Tutsis, and passed laws restricting the number of university places or civil-service jobs they could hold. Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu despot who ruled Rwanda from 1973 until 1994, convinced many Hutus that the mere fact of his being a member of the majority tribe legitimised his rule.

In Burundi, it was the other way around. A tiny clique of Tutsi officers clung to power by force, and by persuading their fellow Tutsis that if they ever let go, the Hutus would kill all Tutsis.

In the 1990s, both countries collapsed into civil war. The fighting was bitterest in Rwanda. After Mr Kagame and his fellow Tutsi exiles invaded the country in 1990, the Hutu elite started to propagate the idea that all Tutsis were fifth-columnists. “Hate” radio and newspapers portrayed the Tutsi rebels as demonic creatures with tails and glowing eyes. The Hutu masses were carefully softened up for a genocide in which every able-bodied one of them was expected to wield a machete.

The spark came in April 1994, when President Habyarimana was murdered by unknown assassins. Within hours, Hutu militiamen and soldiers began butchering Tutsis. Those ethnic identity cards told them whom to kill. The genocide ended when Mr Kagame's Tutsi rebels won control of Rwanda, driving the killers and a fifth of the remaining population into Congo, or Zaire as it was then called.

Tutsis topple a tyrant

Hidden among the refugees, and gorging on western food aid, the génocidaires regrouped in Congo. So, in 1996, Rwanda's new Tutsi army followed them in. The army of Congo's dying dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, melted before them. Mr Kagame decided that he might as well conquer the whole country. He dressed up the invasion as an indigenous revolt, and installed at its helm an obscure, greedy and thuggish guerrilla boss, Laurent Kabila.

Because Mobutu was a pink-champagne-swilling kleptocrat, most people were glad to see him go. The crowds in Kinshasa waved palm fronds to welcome the victorious Mr Kabila. The western media were largely fooled, too.

And a Hutu ex-president faces jailAP

It is now clear that Mr Kabila played only a minor role in his own revolt. General James Kabarebe, the Rwandan army chief in Congo at the time, told The Economist that across half of Congo, the rebellion involved “no Congolese soldiers. The actual fighting was all done by Rwandans.” Only once, says General Kabarebe, did Mr Kabila offer him tactical advice. “He told me: ‘Kijana [young man], tell one of your soldiers to climb a tall tree here, and another to climb a tall tree there, and let more soldiers climb more trees roundabout, then, at the command, let them all fire in the air. Your enemies will be terrified, and they will run.'”

Most of the time, Mr Kabila remained several hundred miles behind the front line, collecting diamonds and sycophants. On entering the mining town of Mbuji-Mayi, he was presented with a fat parcel of diamonds, according to General Kabarebe. At night, his bodyguards heard him chuckling himself to sleep, the rocks stashed carefully under his pillow.

Once he was president of Congo, Mr Kabila decided he no longer wanted to take orders from the Rwandans. In 1998, he threw out his Rwandan advisers. Rwanda responded by sponsoring another rebellion fronted by Congolese Tutsis.

Mr Kabila called on the people of Congo to defend his regime, but he could not cite any positive reasons why they should. He was just as corrupt as Mobutu, but without the old monster's charm. So he appealed instead to the nastiest strain of Congolese nationalism. He orchestrated a pogrom of Tutsis. His chef de cabinet, Yerodia Ndombasi, called them “scum, germs that must be methodically eradicated,” and urged people to kill them with machetes, axes, arrows, barbed wire and sticks. Thousands of Congolese youths answered the call-up.

In the end, however, Mr Kabila's bulging hide was saved by the timely intervention of Angola and Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, said he was sending his army to Congo to stop the Tutsis from carving out an empire. He also had his eye on Congo's diamond mines, but his claim to be standing up to Tutsi imperialism gives a clue as to how far the anti-Tutsi ideology had spread.

The war lasted five years and left an area two-thirds the size of western Europe a smoking wreck. In 2003, when the belligerents were too exhausted to fight on, they signed a peace deal. Mr Kabila was unable to join the celebrations, having been assassinated in 2001. His son Joseph heads a transitional government, which includes all the main rebel groups. The transitional regime is now under immense strain.

One vice-president, Azarias Ruberwa, a Tutsi who used to fight for Rwanda, is making thinly-veiled threats to pull out of the government and go back to war. This week, he flew into the eastern town of Goma, a stronghold of his dormant rebel movement. He said he was there to mourn the massacre in Gatumba. His spokesmen suggest that if the government cannot protect Tutsis, it is up to the Tutsis to protect themselves.

They can expect backing from Rwanda, which has continued to arm and supply diehard Tutsi rebels in eastern Congo, though it denies it. Rwandan troops have also made sporadic incursions across the border. In March, UN officers found weapons dropped mysteriously in the waters of Lake Kivu, close to the Rwandan border, and marked with bamboo poles.

In June, two dissident Tutsi commanders attacked the town of Bukavu, and briefly captured it. The Congolese garrison responded with some random killings of Tutsi civilians. At one point, soldiers broke into a hospital, dragged out a Tutsi patient and beat him to death with bricks. And when a pro-government militia took your correspondent hostage along with a Rwandan journalist, they tapped a grenade against the terrified Tutsi's head and gloated: “Tonight we will eat your liver.”

President Kabila has sent 13,000 fresh troops to eastern Congo to crush the Tutsi rebels. They lurk somewhere in the bush, unpaid and restless. A showdown is expected around Goma.

Wanderers and settlers

People in the Great Lakes region sometimes speak of “the Tutsi question”, an eerie evocation of Adolf Hitler's “Judenfrage”, but one that also obscures the bitter divisions among Tutsis themselves.

In Rwanda, the main division is between the exiles, who marched back with Mr Kagame and took over in 1994, and those who were in Rwanda at the time of the genocide but somehow survived. The génocidaires tried especially hard to exterminate the Tutsi intelligentsia, so it is perhaps inevitable that many of those in positions of power today are former exiles.

The genocide survivors complain, albeit quietly, that the government neglects them—the very people in whose name it rules. Because the government is so intolerant of dissent, some have been forced to flee the country. In one bizarre instance, an exiled group of Tutsi genocide survivors joined some of the heirs of the genocidal “Hutu power” movement and forged a “blood pact” against Mr Kagame's regime.

But discontent among Rwandan Tutsis is usually trumped by tribal solidarity. Although no one in Rwanda is supposed to speak of Hutus and Tutsis, they know that 85% of their compatriots are Hutu. “They would finish us off,” says one Tutsi. No Hutu would dare make such a threat in public, of course.

In Congo, Tutsis are divided between those who want to live in peace with other Congolese, and those who calculate that collaborating with the Rwandans will make them rich and powerful. The first group is infuriated by Rwanda's meddling. Enoch Ruberangabo, for example, a Congolese Tutsi deputy in the national parliament, complains that Mr Kagame's regime has deliberately aggravated the ethnic divide in Congo, and that it is Congolese Tutsis who suffer the consequences. Mr Ruberangabo's family has been in Congo since the 19th century, but yowling mobs in Kinshasa have made it clear that he is not welcome. He has ignored them. “Where do you want me to go?” he asks, “This is my home.”

Many Congolese would disagree. Researchers associated with New York State University asked a broad sample whether they thought Tutsis were Congolese. Over 80% said “no”. Some quote a Swahili saying: “Even if a log lies in a river for 100 years, it doesn't become a crocodile.”

Successive Congolese governments have treated Tutsis with suspicion. Mobutu passed a law granting them citizenship in 1972, only to revoke it nine years later. This year, Congo's (unelected) parliament is due to consider a new draft law on nationality, which might be more inclusive. But then again, it might not.

The future for the Tutsis looks precarious

Congo's first proper election is due next year, but few Congolese believe that it will actually be held. There have been two apparent coup attempts this year, and on July 13th, eight MPs thought to be linked to Rwanda quit their posts, complaining that the government had achieved little.

The future for the Tutsis looks precarious. Last week's massacre could provide a pretext for all the powers in the Great Lakes region to behave worse. The Rwandan government can cite the graves of Gatumba as proof that Congolese Tutsis need its forceful protection. Tutsi powerbrokers in Burundi may use the massacre as an excuse to hold up the peace process there. And Mr Ruberwa and his Congolese Tutsi followers may decide to take up arms again. That would be as foolish as it would be tragic. A new war in Congo would pit the Tutsis against everyone else.